Multivector distributed denial-of-service attacks are having a bigger impact than simple volumetric attacks, says Brian McCann, president of Netscout's security business unit, who analyzes the latest trends in an in-depth interview.

More than 95,000 servers that run the open source Memcached utiltity appear to remain vulnerable to being abused to launch massive DDoS attacks, with one such attack reaching a record 1.7 terabits per second. Here's how organizations and IT administrators must respond.

In a groundbreaking prosecution, two individuals in Ukraine have been sentenced for running extortion campaigns that disrupted international victims' websites with massive DDoS attacks unless they paid bitcoin ransoms of up to $10,000.

Say hello to a new type of DDoS attack: UDP amplification via internet-facing servers running memcached, an open source distributed caching system that can be abused to amplify DDoS attacks by a factor of 50,000.

Arkansas developer Taylor Huddleston has been sentenced to serve more than two years in prison for developing, marketing and selling two tools designed to be used maliciously - the NanoCore remote access Trojan and Net Seal license software.

Australia's real-time payments platform, which launched last week, includes a feature designed to reduce fraud and erroneous payments. Ironically, the feature may also expose users to social engineering attacks.

As internet of things devices become increasingly common in the enterprise, CISOs must lead the way in making sure emerging security issues, including a higher risk of distributed denial-of-service attacks, are adequately addressed, says John Pescatore of the SANS Institute, which offers training for CISOs and others.

Illegal transactions on the internet have long been conducted in the cryptocurrency bitcoin. But underground vendors are accepting new kinds of virtual currency that may be safer to store and offer more privacy protections, according to a new study of 150 dark web markets and forums.

In separate cases, two hackers have either pleaded guilty or been sentenced to serve jail time in part for launching or facilitating DDoS attacks. One defendant, John Kelsey Gammell, was unmasked after taunting a former employer over the "ongoing IT issues" his DDoS attacks were causing.

The browser is the window to the web. But what's going in the background during that browsing is opaque to most users. A new experiment shows how the computing power of tens of thousands of computers could be unknowingly harnessed to crack passwords, harvest cryptocurrencies or conduct DDoS attacks.

Internet of things security alert: An attacker has been attempting to infect hundreds of thousands of Huawei home routers with a variant of the notorious Mirai malware called Satori, security researchers warn. Huawei has confirmed the flaw and issued patches and workarounds for affected users.

A British teenager has avoided jail time after pleading guilty to thousands of DDoS disruptions against Amazon, Netflix, NatWest Bank and others. Separately, a U.S. man has pleaded guilty to launching DDoS attacks on behalf of Lizard Squad and PoodleCorp, among other offenses.